Tuesday, January 10, 2006

In granting a GSA contract to sell MySQL relational database software into the federal government for the next four years, the Feds have blessed another component of open source software. Bad news for Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. The maturity of MySQL was a factor in the decision.

The U.S. federal government also met in November to flesh out a process of building an open-source software stack that will be used across agencies to develop, deploy and maintain applications across their life cycle. That stack will include such open-source components as the JBoss application server and the Eclipse application development environment. I find such a federal software stack very interesting, primarily because it will likely create a parallel non-government use of the open source stack by enterprise and commercial software developers.